Big Dumb Fun. With Pussies: Avenging Spider-Man #7 Review

In a spring season loaded with Batman battling to save Gotham from the Court of Owls, and The Avengers trading punches with the X-Men with the fate of the world hanging in the balance, sometimes Event Fatigue sets in. And sometimes you want a change of pace from the ongoing Superhero Apocalypse, and as you look at your normal alternatives – the Zombie Apocalypse in The Walking Dead or the Zombie Apocalypse in Crossed: Badlands are normally pretty much it – you maybe start wishing for a nice, fun, and maybe a little goofy one-and-done to cleanse the palate as a change of pace.

Or maybe you just have a thing for cats. Maybe your house smells like cat litter and ammoniac urine, the Internet doesn’t give you enough other cats to fill in the gap, and where the rubber hits the road, you’re despondent that you just can’t hug all the cats, despite oodles of free time with which you can pursue this goal thanks to the aforementioned ammoniac smell. Either way, Avenging Spider-Man #7 is the book you’ve been looking for, and between it and Versus, it is living proof that, from the standpoint of just plain fun comics, Kathryn and Stuart Immonen should be allowed to do whatever the fuck they want, ever.

This issue begins with Spider-Man and She-Hulk teaming up against a giant fish monster in the sewers of New York. What is this monster, and how did Spider-Man and She-Hulk come together to defeat it? Who gives a shit? For the book to work, these two needed to team up, and the fish-monster is a perfectly good excuse. Everyone grab a chair and listen to your old Uncle Rob: back in the dark ages of the 1970s, there was a book called Marvel Team-Up, in which Spider-Man would bump into a superhero and they would fight a bad guy together for the remaining 23 pages, before defeating the bad guy and then going home. No, not together; that would have been Marvel Ream-Up, a title that I now categorically and legally own, and might commission at SDCC’s Artists’ Alley this year. But I digress.

Did it make sense for Spider-Man to just bump into another superhero every month? Fuck no, but back then it didn’t have to. The only thing it had to do was be fun… and considering that Avenging Spider-Man has been set up as the spiritual successor to Marvel Team-Up, I’m surprised it’s taken seven issues for a creative team to embrace some of the spirit of the book’s ancestor.

Spidey and She-Hulk then wind up battling the embodiment of Bastet, the Egyptian goddess of cats, along with about a million stray cats (start hugging, Debbie!). During this, She-Hulk grows a green cat’s tail, and Spider-Man puts on a bull mask to imitate a different Egyptian god’s minion. Does any of this make any sense at all? Outside the boundaries of this particular issue, fuck no. It’s silly as hell. However, it’s all internally consistent, and most importantly, it’s just balls-out fun. I am willing, in a self-contained one-and-done, to accept almost any plot development that leads to She-Hulk debating whether or not it’s okay to Hulk Punch a kitten, or to seeing Spider-Man wearing a bull mask and saying, “Yes. Absolutely. One hundred percent. I am completely fighting on the side of beef.”

Stuart Immonen’s art is much as it ever is, which is thin yet simply lined, detailed comic art, with simple and easy-to-follow panel layout, and excellent storytelling. This is a book without much in the way of conventional superhero action; after the fish-man punch up on page one, most of the action revolves around dealing with about a bazzilion cats wandering around the landscape messing shit up. Yet Immonen makes such a thing action-packed enough to keep things interesting and dynamic, and the standard superhero poses actually amp up the humor in a few scenes. If I have one complaint about his art, it’s that while Immonen draws expressive faces – a key skill in a light-hearted, humor-driven book such as this – all those faces look remarkably the same. It can become somewhat distracting, but in general I find that the virtues of the visuals far outweigh any vices.

This comic book will not make you smarter. It will not give you any insights into current turbulence in the Marvel Universe, it will not advance the long-term characterizations of Spider-Man or She-Hulk in any appreciable way, and it will probably never be spoken of in the 616 ever again. But what it will do it offer you some balls-out silly and humorous fun that you can pick up without any advance knowledge or deep understanding of current events – or, frankly, any events – surrounding the Avengers Vs. X-Men event. It’s simply a good time.

And it has cats. And She-Hulk with a cat’s tail. Meaning at least two different subcultures are gonna love this book. Probably inappropriately.